The day you stop being willing to be bad at something new is the day you stop becoming someone new.
I haven't been bad at anything in public for six years, and I'm starting to think it's the reason I feel dead inside.
Not depressed. Not burned out. Just dead. Like a room with no windows.
This is the trap. You spend your twenties getting good at one thing so it can carry you, and then it carries you, and then you can't put it down. You don't try new things because new things would require you to be the worst person in the room, and the version of you that pays the apartment doesn't do that anymore.
You call it focus. It's not focus. It's fear with a calendar.
From the inside, it looks like this. You download a Spanish app because you've lived in Mexico for three months, and the shame of not speaking it has started to hum in the background. You do it for nine days. On day ten, you stumble through a real conversation with the woman at the coffee place, and you butcher a verb tense, and she smiles and corrects you, and you walk out and never open the app again.
You tell yourself you've been busy. You haven't been busy. You've been protecting something.
You buy a guitar in Lisbon because you've always wanted to play guitar. You play it for a week. You're terrible. You stop. The guitar leans against the wall for eight months until you move out and give it to a kid in the building who actually practices.
You get invited to play pickleball with a buddy and his dad. His dad is 64. You say you can't, you have a call. You don't have a call. You just don't want to lose to a 64-year-old in front of strangers.
A woman I dated for a while told me one time that I had stopped being curious. I told her she was wrong. I read three books a month. I listen to podcasts. I know things. She said no, that's not curious. Curious is when you let yourself be stupid in front of someone. You haven't done that in years.
I broke up with her about a month later. Partly because she was right and partly because I didn't want to be looked at that closely.
Here's what I figured out way after I should have. The thing competence does to you is it makes every new thing feel like it has too much riding on it. When you don't know who you are yet, being bad at piano is just being bad at piano. When you've built an identity around being a guy who's good at things, being bad at piano feels like a referendum on whether you're still that guy. So you don't pick up the piano. You pick up the thing you're already good at, again, for the eight thousandth time.
You start to mistake repetition for depth.
What changed for me was, of all things, surfing. Which is funny, because I'd been surfing for fifteen years. But I'd been surfing the same waves the same way. Safe ones. Waves I knew. Last year, I tried to paddle out somewhere bigger and faster than I had any business being, with a guy who was actually good, and I got worked. I mean, really worked. I came up coughing seawater with my leash wrapped around my neck, and a 22-year-old paddled over to ask if I was okay.
I was the worst guy out there. By a lot. And when I got back to the beach, I noticed I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Not pride. Not accomplishment. Something simpler. I felt awake.
I'd been confusing comfort for happiness for years. They are not the same damn thing, and I am not going to forget it again.
I'm not telling you to learn an instrument. I don't care if you learn an instrument. What I'm saying is that somewhere in your life right now, there is a thing you would love to try, and you are not trying it, and the reason isn't time, and it isn't money. The reason is that you would be bad at it, and you have forgotten how to be bad at things.
You used to be bad at the thing that pays you now. That is how you got good at it. You're acting like that part of your life is over.
It isn't over. You just stopped letting it happen.
The best version of you was a beginner once. He's still in there. He's waiting for you to embarrass him on purpose.
— Best, Jose
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